In our great debates about education: vocational vs grammar, 21st Century skills for the jobs that don’t yet exist vs academic education, something always seems to be missed and that is an academic education is good for all.

As Frank Lampard explains in the interview:

You’ll benefit if you bring through players who are intelligent. The best players in the world are smart and clever on the pitch and you can’t tell me that’s not a well rounded thing.

Lampard, educated at Brentwood Independent school, feels he was fortunate to have had a good education:

…not just maths and science, but life education – and these are big things that relate on the pitch. You see it how certain players hold themselves…

He sees it as a responsibility for all football clubs to cover – educate the youngsters especially those you pull out of school at 15/16… For those that don’t make it need a good education to fall back on and those that do make it need it to fall back on too. Part of Lampard’s history is his time at West Ham Football Club.

The academy of football set up by Ted Fenton at West Ham as the ‘Cafe Cassettari’ club, where social aspects such as welcoming and providing warm food, were expanded by Malcolm Allison:

…players would exchange views on the game and make tactical plans around the dinner table, illustrating their ideas with the use of salt and pepper pots. The culmination of those years of hard work, on and off the field, was the Second Division championship in 1958 – the springboard to great cup successes at a much higher level in the mid-60s … no one should underestimate the positive influence of Malcolm Allison’s earlier role in Hammers’ history

West Ham Club History: John Hellier

This idea should be taken further. We should realise the benefit of players and trainees knowing about Shakespeare, Goethe, Germaine Greer, Beethoven, CLR James, Brendan Behan, Gaugin, Virginia Woolf, Boadicea, Euclid, Euripides, St Augustine and Confucius; the poetry of life gives backbone to the poetry on the pitch.

Whether you are an academy of football or an ‘ordinary’ academy or school, an academic education should be for all. We are all children of a sacred olive grove (Hekademia (Ἑκαδήμεια)) dedicated to the Athena, goddess of wisdom, that gave rise to our word academia and to Plato’s famous academy.

And our children should benefit from a life dedicated to Athena too.

Whether they are to be footballers or scientists, leaders or followers, down on their luck or lucky, an academic education will enrich all their lives.